CS 5150Software

EngineeringLecture 23

People 1 (and a little Reliability)

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Administrivia

• Quiz 3 this evening

• Design patterns

• Security/privacy

• Reliability

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Final Milestone

• Client satisfaction

• In previous milestones my evaluation of client satisfaction has been informal

• This time I will ask them to send me an email a few days after receiving the final deliverable, with answers to a couple simple questions about how well the project went

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SE in the News

•Adobe user data leak

•Weak password hash function

•Double Irish and Dutch Sandwich

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Determinism => Reproducibility

• It is very hard to fix bugs that cannot be reproduced reliably

• Do not introduce unnecessary non-determinism into your programs

• Random numbers

• Address-based data structures

• Multithreading

• Time limits vs effort limits

• Environment dependencies

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Fault Injection

• While the system is running, force some component to break

• Is used in production systems

• Must be handled carefully

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Safety-Critical Systems

• Much more emphasis on validation and verification

• Beyond the scope of 5150

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Managing People

• Software Development Staff

• Professional staff are the major cost of software

• Staff vary greatly in productivity:

• Ability

• Education and training

• Motivation

• Interaction with colleagues and leaders

• Work environment has an impact on productivity

• How do you lead, motivate, hire, reward, and retain good people?

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Managing People

• Theoretical

• Organizational behavior

• Industrial psychology

• Group behavior

• Cognitive fundamentals

• Economic motivation

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Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

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Management Implications of Maslow's Hierarchy

• Physiological needs:

• Food, water, breathing, sleep

• Safety Needs:

• Security of person, health, family

• Social Needs:

• Friendship, colleagues, intimacy

• Esteem Needs:

• Self esteem, confidence, achievements, respect of others

• Self-Actualization:

• The opportunity to reach full potential

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Software is Built by Teams

• Best size for a team is 3 to 8 people

• Team members may include:

• developers (from trainee to expert)

• domain experts

• graphic or interface designers

• software librarians

• testers

• etc.

• Teams must have:

• administrative leadership (manager)

• technical leadership (may be the manager)

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Administrative Leader (Manager)

• Personnel

• Assigning tasks

• Hiring, promoting, etc.

• Resources

• Budgets

• Space, facilities

• Equipment

• Project management

• Relationships with other teams, management, and clients

• Project plan and schedule

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Group Working

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Communication

• Staff meetings (non-technical)

• Technical meetings

• Facilitation

• Record of decisions

• Informal

• Kitchen, smokers' doorway, after work, etc.

• Walkabout (tours)

• Ad hoc meetings

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Communication

• Management of teams dispersed across locations

• Creating a team sense

• Face-to-face meetings

• Occasional but regular, e.g., once or twice per year

• Entire team, including support staff

• Remote meetings on a regular schedule (e.g., conference calls)

• Technical and administrative groups

• Clear division of responsibility between locations

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Meetings

• Meetings require leadership and a willingness to be led

• Time keeping -- do not be late; end on time or earlier

• Clear purpose for meeting, with agenda

• e.g., progress reports, design review, budget

• Preparation

• materials circulated in advance with time to prepare

• studied by all participants

• Facilitation during meeting

• opportunities for all to speak

• summing up to check agreement

• Notes taken during meeting (scribe) and circulated promptly

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Meetings

• For excellent advice on how to run a meeting (with highly humorous examples of how not to), see:

• John Cleese and Antony Jay, Meetings, bloody meetings. Video Arts, 1976, revised 1976. [DVD in Hotel School Library]

• There is a trailer on YouTube:

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZWYnVt-umSA

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Hiring

• Productivity is a combination of:

• Analytic ability

• Verbal ability and communication skills

• Education

• Adaptability and inquisitiveness

• Personality and attitude

• Platform experience

• Programming language experience

• Application domain knowledge

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Staff Retention

• Technically interesting work

• up to date hardware and software

• opportunities to learn and experiment

• Feeling of appreciation

• management recognition

• money, benefits, and promotion

• Working conditions

• space, light, noise, parking

• flexibility

• Organizational dynamics

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Salaries

• Any software developer in the USA has plenty of money to live on (food, clothing, heat, etc.).

• Salaries are used to satisfy the top levels of Maslow's Hierarchy:

• self-actualization

• esteem

• The absolute level of salary is less important than its relative level and how it is presented:

• "The average raise is 4%, but you are getting 5%."

• "Our salaries are in the top 25% of similar companies."

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Firmness

• Managers must be firm when needed:

• Assignment of tasks must be equitable and open; everybody will have to tackle some of the dreary tasks

• Carrots are better than sticks, but poor performance must be addressed.

• Nobody is indispensable; nobody should be allowed to think that they are indispensable

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Turning a Group Around

• To turn a weak group into a strong one is the greatest challenge of leadership

• The art of the possible

• Promotion of the best over the old leaders

• Using opportunities to reorganize

• Resignations and terminations

• Respect people who try, but refuse to accept problem areas

• Persistent and firm is better than brutal and abrupt

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Technical Challenges

• Changes of environment

• Example: Apps -> the Web -> Apps

• Canceling projects

• Example: the Andrew window manager

• Technical tinkering v. needed re-engineering

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To Build and Maintain a Strong Team

• Everybody has a different style. In my experience:

• Be consistent in how you relate to people

• Be open about problems and how you are addressing them

• Explain your decisions

• Do not have secrets

• Ask for advice and help

• Be constructive in criticism of people outside your team

• Support and attend social events

• Set high standards!

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How to be Led

• As a junior member of a team, what can you do to make it productive?

• Follow the team's style of working

• Understand the context of your work

• Make practical suggestions

• Ask for help if you need it

• Accept less interesting tasks

• Attend social events

• Do good work

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Outsourcing

• When might you contract with another organization to carry out some or all parts of the software development process?

• The other organization might have expertise that your organization lacks.

• Your organization might not have a large enough staff.

• The other organization might have lower costs (e.g., it might operate in a country, such as India, where costs are lower).

• Example

• Most software for the US government is built by contractors

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Outsourcing Risks

• The other organization may not be as skilled as you expect

• Staff have their first loyalty to their own organization

• The other organization may have use different terminology or have a different culture (e.g., the organization may not report problems to the client)

• Communication faces geographic and cultural differences

• Unless the task is well understood, it may be difficult to write a contract that manages costs and results (e.g., government contracts are notorious for cost over-runs)

• If your organization contracts out all interesting work, your good staff will leave

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Outsourcing: Conclusions

• When work is out-sourced, the client must be vigilant.

• The client must take responsibility for managing the relationships between the project and the client's organization

• The client must have a management and technical team that can track the work being done, monitor quality, review changes to scope, etc.

• The contract should be explicit about expectations, deliverables, ownership of software, and mechanisms for payment

• The client must be closely involved with user testing and must control the acceptance testing

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Careers in Computing

• What will you be doing:

• One year from now?

• Ten years from now?

• Careers outside computing

• Careers in which you personally continue to do technical work

• Careers in which you are responsible for the technical work of others

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Careers outside Computing

• A computing background can be valuable in any career:

• management, government, law, medicine, philanthropy, etc.

• Education in computing is an asset:

• Computing is a vital part of almost every organization

• Education in logical thinking and tackling large tasks systematically

• Education in computing is a potential weakness:

• Not every problem can be solved by rational thinking alone

• Importance of skills with people, judgment, etc.